Let's start. There is a story in the Quran about a group of Christians

who escaped persecution by taking refuge in a cave. There they fell into a very long sleep, which they thought only lasted a day or two. But it actually had lasted for centuries. They were obviously very hungry

after a few centuries of sleeping. It was only when they went down to the city to buy some food that they realized how much time had passed. So when they wanted to pay, nobody accepted their money. This is what happened to me in 2014

when I was freed from a six-year long imprisonment in Tehran over my web activism. I was a pioneer in tech journalism and in blogging in Iran. And for that reason, they came to call me the blog father there. I had many readers, many friends,

and obviously many enemies. When I was freed, I realized that the currency that we all used those days had become obsolete. I'm talking about those blue underlined bits of text on where you could click on, on where you could click and be transferred

to another web page, to an unknown place, to another world. They were called hyperlinks. I understood that most of the blogs I used to read were abandoned now. The vibrant Persian blogosphere

that I dedicated myself to promote was a graveyard now. I started searching for bloggers and surprisingly enough, I found them all in a place called Facebook. In 2008, before I was arrested in Tehran, I thought of Facebook as a great place

to keep in touch with new and old friends, to maintain a social network of the people I knew in person. What had happened during my absence was that Facebook had also become a publishing platform as well as a social network.

First, most readers of blogs moved to Facebook and then authors also had to follow. Facebook is a closed publishing platform, something like a password-protected blog, which I always hated.

It is also a very centralized and limiting one. You can't host it on your own domain name and you can't change how it looks like. But soon I discovered the main problem with Facebook is something deeper, Facebook doesn't like hyperlinks.

Let's go back a little bit. Hyperlink was the foundation of Tim Berners-Lee's invention, the World Wide Web. It was what made the web so incredibly diverse,

open, nonlinear, and decentralized. It was the biggest achievement of human civilization since the emergence of alphabets, writing, and printing press. Blogs best illustrated the potentials of hyperlinks.

In the era of blogging, we used to read and discuss all the time. We used to challenge each other, make arguments, provide evidence, investigate, discover, debate. We used to think a lot. And most of that would have not been impossible

without hyperlinks. Those days, anyone who had more hyperlinks from or to her webpage was considered as wealthy. But now on Facebook, and increasingly on most social networks,

instead of links, we have likes. And instead of thinking, we have a reality show. On Facebook, which the most people on the planet would soon mean the entire internet, because more than half of the people in Brazil and India

think Facebook is the internet or vice versa, links are treated as objects, not as relations anymore. And this is a huge difference. They are not supposed to enrich your text. They are themselves open to a popularity contest.

Likes are less and less, sorry, links are less and less encouraged, because social networks make money only if you're inside of them. Instagram completely bans hyperlinks. And Facebook, with its instant article project,

has found a way to even further minimize links. Meanwhile, smartphones pose a different threat. Webpages are filled with ads and scripts that slow down everything, so less and less people follow links on mobile web browsers or open several tabs,

because it's just a hassle. And quality web-based media are losing more and more money because people are using ad blockers. The result is that with the demise of links, the web is dying.

Now the internet is comprised of social media apps rather than websites, and these apps are not even connected to each other. But the new internet is also different in other ways. It's catching up quickly with the offline world and its dominant social values.

Let's look at algorithms that social networks now use to show us what we need to know. What they pick is based on two things, how recent they are, how many likes they have received.

Basically, they only show you what is new and what is popular. These are the two most dominant social values of our time. Newness and popularity. Anything else is doomed to silence, to a quiet death.

And isn't this like our society's obsession with young celebrities? And our increasing negligence of the elderly and the minorities? Facebook newsfeed's algorithms

reinforce our views and opinions, because they work according to our habits. But at the same time, they suppress minorities because a minority opinion never gets enough likes to appear on people's newsfeeds. It also radicalizes them,

not only by producing a sense of frustration that comes from imposed silence, but also by depriving them, like all of us, from being challenged. Facebook and other social networks have put an end to a utopian vision we were all inspired by a decade ago.

A diverse, open, nonlinear, and decentralized space that promoted dialogue and tolerance. Now, when we log on to Facebook and scroll down and see

all these entertaining pictures and videos, there is nothing left of that utopian vision. This is not the internet I used to know before I went to jail. This linear, passive, centralized, and homogenous stream of still or moving images

is nothing but television. A personalized television with many of its features. It has a prime time, imagine that. When more people are tuned in and can see the stream.

It is heavily dependent on celebrities. It treats the most serious topics in the most shallow, rushed, and emotional way. It is obsessed with sound bites and infographics. It is closed and self-referential.

The new internet is clearly not a place for thinking and debate, as it used to be. No wonder why all those so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions around the world collapsed. When algorithms replace charismatic leaders, they divide everyone into numerous separate bubbles,

fragmenting their unity of will and vision and leading them into fighting each other rather than pushing for their cause. There is another aspect to this shift from library internet to television internet.

We seem to be moving from a word-centered to an image-centered society. Look at what's happening to news outlets. They are rapidly losing readers, especially among the younger people. They are creating or expanding their video departments while downsizing their newsrooms.

Look at emojis and how they are forming a universal pre-alphabetical language. Look at the shifts in our trends, from blogs to Twitter and now to Instagram. Less and less text, more and more videos.

This is recreating the social formation of the old historical times, where a tiny elite of religious scholars and politicians were able to read, write, and think.

This was how they controlled their largely illiterate people and justified their continuous dominance. Soon, anyone who can read more than 140 characters, yes, I'm exaggerating here, will be considered as literate.

The rest who are hooked to their old or new TVs, and I mean mobile personalized TV and now smartphones, will be amused to death, as Neil Postman said. Somehow, this is already happening in a culture

that invented television and is now dominated by it. Donald Trump was produced by the old and the new television and is now on his way to rule over the most TV-centered society in the world.

So where are the points of resistance in all this? How can we reimagine a space that notches debate, diversity, and understanding, and non-linearity? One way out of this horrifying tunnel

is probably to reimagine new algorithms with new kinds of social values, such as diversity or quality. It is possible if we have created algorithms that enforce our habits, we can also get them to challenge those habits.

DJs do this all the time. Their selections are not based on what's new and what's popular, necessarily. They play old tracks we all loved in the past, and they surprise us with great stuff we would never have listened otherwise.

So maybe it's time, at the same time, on a different level, maybe it's time for states to intervene and push big social networks to open up their algorithms and also allow third-party developers to create different kinds of algorithms as plugins.

The truth is our habits are destroying us now, and hyperlinks were one powerful, brilliant idea to challenge them. We must revive hyperlinks somehow to help save the world from growing conflicts.

What we need now, more than ever, is not to be comforted. It is to be surprised. Thank you.

So are there any questions? So please raise your, oh yeah, over there. How much time do we have?

Thank you for this, let's say, thought-challenging talk. Let me start by stating that I do not personally use Facebook because it annoys me, but still I think your view of television and Facebook as an analogy as a great destroyer

of culture and debate, and especially putting the blame for political phenomenons like the collapse of revolutions or the rise of Donald Trump on media does not make much sense to me.

I don't think media, any media, not even Facebook is inherently evil or destroys culture, debate as such. Media is what people make of it, and one could argue, for example, that emojis as a pre-alphabetic universal language

are a beautiful thing because they stop language barriers. I think your talk was the first time ever I heard universal language being used in a negative context. So I just wanna challenge the thought

that a kind of media can be evil in itself and destroying discourse and even bring down revolutions. I don't think media works this way. Thank you. Let's take a few other questions maybe and then I'll answer all together.

Is there any other question? No, at the moment. Oh yeah, over here. Or comments maybe even, not even questions. Hi. If I got it correctly, you mentioned that, for example, states should help us enforce social networks

to open their algorithm, was that correct? What do you think about the fact that this algorithm are basically in the possession of companies and corporation that lately have been at the forefront of the defense, which is quite strange, of civil rights and some sort of liberties?

I think about what happened recently just yesterday and today with Facebook in Brazil, for example, and WhatsApp, the blockade of WhatsApp, and Facebook taking position against that and in defense of encryption end to end on WhatsApp, for example.

That's something that is actually very important to all of us, but that's at the same time a corporatization, I would say, of the civil rights defense. How that stands in your discourse and how should we deal with the fact that this corporation in some way are also balancing the overreaching of the states

that you mentioned should help us regulating them? Okay, let's address the first question or comment and then I'll come back to this one. I think the web was a very short window in the human history where non-linearity was encouraged

and non-linearity has many connections to many other kinds of social and cultural phenomena. Personally, I see the decreasing tolerance for immigrants or for other racial groups

or other opinions as a result of a decline in non-linearity. And then the problem is not about the shift necessarily

from one form of communications to another form of communications. It is about the capacities that each one had and the capacity that text and words have always had to empower knowledge, to empower debate and to encourage and to promote tolerance

and dialogue was much more than image. And there are lots of studies in the media studies field about how television is incapable of conveying some complicated messages that you would be able to find and read in books,

for example, in magazine or basically in a written format. And it also brings with itself a culture which is you can see now in parts of the world that TV television dominates or even among your own friends and family, the people who are hooked to their television sets

are completely different from many aspects to the ones who are not. Of course, I'm not saying that, I'm not blaming people for watching television. That's another aspect of capitalism that is consuming your energy and time so much

that when you get home after so many hours of work, you don't have any energy left to read anything complicated or complex and you only want to watch something shallow and you laugh and then go to bed. And this is another aspect

which is maybe a larger political aspect. One more thing that I wanted to say was that, and I forgot now. Okay, let's talk about the other question. I think the government can intervene now. There is cultural and maybe even legal justifications

for it because now the social networks exert more power in some domains of lives, of our lives than the governments, than the states. For instance, these algorithms are now determining what people buy, what people watch or see

or read, how people meet each other and date. And I don't think any state can dismiss the possibility of not having any control on many of these aspects of lives, at least in countries where states are respectful,

not in the US maybe where the state is always considered as an evil for a long time, at least among the majority or maybe at least among the Republicans. But I think now it's time. It's the power of these private corporations

is getting beyond what is probably allowed or what was tolerated in a representative democracy and that's a very important thing here. If democracies, if representative democracies are elected by people to represent them in power,

to take care of their infrastructure and security and safety and all that, I think now the social networks are entering some of these aspects of the duties of states and I think it's all legitimate and fair to push the governments to push the corporations

into opening up to some degree and make some of these things a bit more transparent. Is there any other question? I have the microphone here. My name's John Worth. I was saying I encountered you first of all on Twitter,

so Twitter is not always all a bad thing and I encountered your medium essay that way. I'm a long-term blogger about the European Union and I'm about the only person who blogs about that anymore. And the reason that those bloggers have stopped in European Union business is not maybe to do with the stream, but it's to do with the mainstream media having been able to produce much more content

on the web instead. Back in 2005, we bloggers could find niches in between the printed press and that gave us an audience. Today, the mainstream media churns out much more content, churns it all out on the web and those of us that blog in our free time just simply can't find a gap and a space within that anymore. Do you think that's a factor in and above the thesis

that you yourself have presented? Thank you. It could be, yes, definitely there is much more content now on all these social networks. But then at the same time, I think one of the things that relates Twitter to my argument is that Twitter was founded

as a word-centered, as a text-centered idea and concept. But now you can see Twitter is in decline, but Facebook, which was based on an Facebook, was based on an image kind of centered idea is growing rapidly. This is another sign that I think text is in decline.

So it's also related to what you just said that there is too much information now probably and much of it is in visual, is in the form of image still or moving. And that's quite sad that even big newspapers

now are expanding into something which is the function, which has been the function of television. I think in the future, in the very near future, big newspapers and news outlets have, print ones, are going towards two directions at the same time.

One would be one extreme of the spectrum which would be publishing long articles that would be printed and distributed as books. That would be one possibility for the New York Times, for example. And then becoming a television channel with video reports.

And anything that is in the middle is going to disappear because it is losing in a way its justification in many aspects. I have a question about the, it's here in the front. So you mentioned 10 years ago,

Farsi was one of the main languages in the blogosphere and where are the Iranian bloggers now? I would like to know, you just said they all moved to Facebook but could you maybe explain what do they write, what do they do, are they still active or not? Or is there a new generation maybe? And the second question would be,

if Facebook would be really like a kind of television that makes people dumb, that's kind of your, what I got out of your words. Anyway, why is it blocked then in Iran? What does the government has against it? I mean, I know a lot of people still use it

because they, but why is it blocked in so many countries that don't want people to be politically active and get together and exchange thoughts? Yeah. So two questions. Because at the same time that it's a television, it's also a social network and it connects people. And I think for some countries,

maybe this aspect would be a bit problematic. And I'm not saying that Facebook or television is making people dumb. I'm saying that it doesn't challenge them. It doesn't allow them to think they are smart people. Everyone is smart, everyone is intelligent. But this dynamic prevents any kind of deeper look

at problems and issues. It doesn't encourage thinking. And when you don't, it's like exercise. If you don't think a lot, then you would stop thinking and then you would eventually become stupid in some ways. But so basically it's somehow true, but maybe not as simple as that.

And yeah, I answered the first part about the second part about why some governments are, oh, Iranian blogs are now, so there are a few of them

who are still writing in their blogs, but if they don't promote them on social networks, they wouldn't be read. Anything that is outside social networks is kind of irrelevant now, unfortunately. And many of them are actually writing the same stuff that they used to write on Facebook.

Many of them actually, because Instagram is not filtered and blocked in Iran, many of them are actually using Instagram as a text-driven platform for writing long articles. And that's quite funny when you see some, even officials, when they use Instagram for writing about very complicated and serious topics such as nuclear program or nuclear negotiations on Instagram.

But that's happening now. The other thing which is very huge now in Iran is Telegram as a messenger. And it's very interesting because Telegram has a feature called Channels, which allows anyone to write in this channel, basically you can open your own channel

and then people can subscribe to it. So it would function as a one-way kind of communication, like a newsletter in a way. And it's immensely popular now. Anyone who was writing anything, many people who actually were writing even blogs

and many news outlets are now using Telegram channels to communicate with their potential audience. And they have big number of readers because it's hugely popular, maybe around 27 or maybe 30 million Iranians now are using Telegram and this is replacing everything.

It's replaced emails, it's replaced blogs and chats, all other kind of chat platforms. It's one very big, huge thing that dominates everything now in Iran in terms of communications and the internet.

So I would say it's time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Jose, in direction. Thank you very much.